Comment: Terry Pratchett's Study
Simon Willison’s Weblog
Newsletter
7th November 2026
Comment My comment on Terry Pratchett's Study — Hacker News
Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...
But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it.
(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)
Recent articles
Hide your slop PR descriptions behind - 9th November 2026
Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too - 3rd November 2026
The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence” - 2nd November 2026
The October inflection point for vibe game development - 28th October 2026
This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 7th November 2026.
hacker-news 46
terry-pratchett 3
Monthly briefing
Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.
Pay me to send you less!
Sponsor & subscribe
Disclosures
Colophon
©
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026